


Counterclockwise

by Dribbledscribbles



Category: The Magnus Archives
Genre: I can't be proven wrong in-between episodes, M/M, in which we see Yet Another Theory I have decided to throw at the wall
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:14:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,206
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23781397
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dribbledscribbles/pseuds/Dribbledscribbles
Summary: How does one turn the world back?
Relationships: Jonathan Sims/Martin Blackwood
Comments: 16
Kudos: 166





	Counterclockwise

Jon had been thinking of Martin’s phrasing since they set out. 

_A way to turn the world back._

As if there would be some magic undo button waiting for them at the Panopticon. As if getting their hands around Jonah Magnus’ stolen throat would somehow shake lose the cure for the Change and all would return to normal. 

Jon tried to tell himself that his Knowing better was only another trick of the Eye. Even with his mind drowning in the constant barrage of gruesome Knowledge, he couldn’t help but notice that any information pertaining to what was waiting for them in the place that had once been the Institute was mysteriously redacted and/or buried under fresh waves of secondhand terror. The Eye only gave him information it thought would lead to entertaining results. Useful information didn’t necessarily fall in that category.

Plus, he doubted the great voyeur in the sky was in any hurry for him to stumble onto some quick-fix to the apocalypse. If such information did exist, they would have to uncover it for themselves.

Ditto for the conspicuous, mocking vacuum where a solution should be. 

Jon could almost See that outcome in his mind as clear as if it were a memory. He and Martin arriving at the Staring tower, only to find Jonah and assorted other Horrors waiting, throwing confetti of shredded skin and blowing party whistles cut from intestines, surprise, surprise, welcome back, there is no way to undo the hell you’ve delivered unto the world, but good effort! 

No. No, he couldn’t think that yet. The fact that the Change and all the hideous events that led up to it were even possible was, in itself, impossible. Every horrifying happening around them made no form of sense. Ergo, that same lack of sense should leave some room for the other side of the spectrum. The optimistic end which Martin still defiantly clung to. 

If absolute inhuman evil could exist despite all logic, so to could an absolute inhuman good—an antithesis to the Change, at least. Right?

_Right?_

The Eye remained silent on the matter. 

Jon sighed.

“You know, I don’t think you’re actually breathing anymore,” Martin said beside him. “Inhales and exhales are over. You’ve lapsed entirely into sighs and monologues at this point.”

“Sorry. I’ll try to lament quieter.”

“Cut back on your languishing too, if you can.” Martin smiled as he said it. It very nearly reached his eyes. 

The latter were now at least half as shadowed as Jon’s, unused as they were to running on so little sleep. Even without the necessity of REM to slow him down, Jon Knew his body wasn’t yet accustomed to functioning without a rest period. Jon had almost asked a dozen times now if Martin wanted to try being Compelled to nap, but always stopped short. They were making good time, so to speak. The sooner they reached the Panopticon the better. 

Supposedly. In theory.

_How?_ Jon couldn’t stop himself from thinking. _How exactly do we stuff all this grotesque mess back behind the Door? How can all of this possibly be undone?_

And, a worse question, because there were always worse questions: _Would we even be allowed to try this if the Fears didn’t already know it was hopeless?_

Jon was poised on the edge of another sigh, when a flash of Knowing struck him. He looked ahead. The sigh turned into a groan.

“What?”

“There’s our next one.”

“Our next wh—oh. Oh, God damn it.”

“Yeah.”

Not too far ahead, standing in what was ostensibly an empty, eldritch meadow of eyeball blossoms and breathing grass, was a door. An old wooden door that was a sickly, weathered yellow, its knob gleaming with well-worn use. A twin to it stood perhaps half an acre further on. 

It was Martin’s turn to sigh.

“I’m going to guess. Stop me when I miss.”

“Alright.”

“The Spiral, obviously.”

“Yes.”

“If we try to just walk past this door,” Martin gestured to the one in front of them, “we’ll be blocked. Maybe the meadow will just go on and on forever and we’ll never get past the second door. Maybe the meadow is an illusion and we’ll fall into an endless nightmare maze anyway. Maybe the door will just slide in front of us and refuse to move until we touch it and it gets to pretend we ‘willingly’ opened it. Something like that.”

“Mmhm.”

“Meaning we have to get through a labyrinth of pure, mind-melting insanity to cross what should have been a five-minute stroll. Right?”

“Right.”

“ _Right._ ” Martin took a moment to grind his fingertips against his temples. Jon didn’t envy him. He certainly hadn’t enjoyed himself any of the times he’d wandered into one of the Distortion’s doorways, however benign the trips had been. The more Archival he’d become, the less they’d bothered him, but he did remember what it was like to be wholly vulnerable to the Spiral’s twisting innards. Especially with that first go around.

His time in Michael’s halls. He’d been almost as terrified of the maze as exiting it, even with the Not-Them waiting on the other end.

No, that was a lie.

He had been more terrified of the maze. He must have been. 

Otherwise, he’d have been happy to loiter in its mad corridors rather than flee out into the Institute’s tunnels with the murderous doppelganger still sniffing for him. Jon’s memory still refused to completely remove its censoring of that time in Michael’s labyrinth even now. As if the enduring of it was simply barred off in his head, declared unsafe for public viewing. 

But yes. Whatever it was, it had been enough to scare him back into the Not-Them’s reach. Intentionally so, he had to assume.

Because the Distortion-as-Michael had been vengeful. Spiteful. The calculation in his-its head had declared that because Jon was the Archivist, and Gertrude Robinson had been the Archivist, they equated to the same being. Ergo, revenge upon Jon was revenge upon her. 

Helen, such as she-it was, had declared Michael needed evicting from the Distortion’s self due to getting too-human thoughts and whims muddled in. Spoiling their illogical nature. Jon had not been in a position to quibble. Not when he was standing at her-its threshold, still wearing nothing but his birthday suit and Nikola Orsinov’s latest slathering of aloe vera, mere minutes removed from his own assisted suicide. 

And as time had gone on and Helen became something resembling an ally and confidante—right up until it mattered most and he was left dumbstruck and friendless in the wake of her cackling refusal to help—it had simply not occurred to him to bring up the questions which had come to him in quieter moments.

_Would Michael’s version of revenge have even come to him if weren’t for you Distorting his mind? Was it the who that muddled the what or the other way around? He said he didn’t want to be Michael. And he clearly didn’t have to be. Not when he could have been you. So why then? Why switch him out when he was about to kill me?_

The short answer was that Helen had become the Distortion, or vice versa, just in time. The Web’s arrangement, maybe. The Web could have its threads on a hundred things. But that didn’t sit right.

Michael Shelley, or whatever was left of him, had wanted to kill his Archivist. Gertrude Robinson.

Michael, who was not Michael Shelley, could not kill an Archivist who was already dead. But a new Archivist had happened, and the title equalled the same person. Yes? Yes.

What harm would it be if Jon was killed simply because Michael felt like it? What difference did a misaimed grudge—one born of madness, even—make to the Distortion?

Unless it had its own suspicions about what Jon was on the road to. Archivist to Archive. The Key to the Door.

Which meant Michael’s flavor of insanity could not stand. Exit Mr. Shelley, enter Ms. Richardson, who, according to the Distortion that was and wasn’t her, _liked_ him. Would help him, just far enough, and no further. Another eldritch helper to hoist him on the altar—

“Jon.”

Jon came to with a shiver. He turned to Martin. Martin was giving him a look.

“What?” 

“You were talking to yourself again.”

“I was?”

“You were. Something about Michael and Helen, it sounded like. Do you…” Martin nodded at the door, “Do you think she’s in there?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.”

“Do you think she’d help us?”

Jon tried to Know and, naturally:

“I have no clue.”

“Great.” They both took a steeling breath apiece. Then Martin’s hand was locked around his, fingers like padded iron. “Ready?”

“No. Let’s go.”

Jon led the way to the door. They were inside almost the instant he touched the knob.

_Oh, God._

Jon couldn’t tell if he’d thought it or said it.

Beside him, Martin was thinking or saying or thinking of saying or saying of thinking a similar sentiment. He was making very unhappy noises and unhappier faces to go with them. His hair seemed almost as white as Jon’s. 

The Spiral was worse now. So much worse, so much _more_ than it had ever been. Even with his Sight, Jon could barely make a fraction of sense out of the collage of brain-searing angles and curves and melts and maws that were the Spiral’s laughing, screaming bowels. If the halls had formerly resembled a headache-glazed trip through an Escher image, this was Escher mated with H.R. Giger and soaked in acid. 

Others were there, of course. Many others. Some Jon could see with his own lying eyes, sprawled to all corners, lost in Places That Were Not, trapped in the deathless throes of weeping, shrilling lunacy. He wished desperately, guiltily, that this was all there was to see. That the victims he was privy to with his plain, gullible, formerly human vision were all he need witness. But no.

He Saw it all. Knew it all. Every iota of pain and dread and unanswered prayer for reprieve rushed into him like an ocean going through a funnel. The stomach that was his mind heaved with the influx of it. 

Even in the Spiral, the Archive was clear, cognizant, and dutifully feeding on the free-floating misery it offered. It was better than the alternative, if Martin was any indication. Even if Jon’s small protection was enough to shield him from the physical alterations the Spiral was making to its visitors, the tears and sweat polishing his face suggested his mind wasn’t so protected. 

They had to move. 

Jon hadn’t pulled them forward two steps before their hall suddenly bucked like a bitten horse. They were launched up into the air, the space around them thick as slush, turning them over like astronauts in the vacuum. Jon swore and had to catch over and over at Martin’s arm. Martin clawed and beat at his hands wherever he grabbed, screaming all the while.

“Worms!” Martin gasped, shrilled. “The worms, Jon, where are you, the worms are here, they’re back, _they’re coming, Jon_ —,”

Jon could See what he saw. Jon was now Jane, her fingers grown long and boneless and squirming. Searching for welcoming flesh to burrow in.

“Martin! Martin, look at me! Just at me! _Look!_ ” Jon gave the order in his Voice. Martin had to Look. And he saw.

“Jon? Jon, where is she? Prentiss, she was—,”

“It’s the Spiral. Just—just keep looking at me, alright? Don’t look at this place, don’t listen to it, and do not let go, okay?”

“Okay. Okay,” Martin breathed. Then he glanced above Jon’s head. His eyes screwed shut. “Oh, God.”

The Spiral whirled violently around them, making them fall, fly, float; spinning them around and upside down until they faced the direction that wore the Spiral’s face. Its grin was far wider than her-its remaining skin allowed.

“Jon!” Helen crowed from no mouths and all mouths at once. “There you are! Goodness, it’s been ages! I’d welcome your beau as well, only I don’t think he’s in the proper state for a chat.” The coils that served for eyes looked in Martin’s direction. “Are you, Martin? Can’t even spare me a little hello? A handshake?”

A hand extended. The razor fingers were now longer than a body was tall, the knuckles so many and so fluid that they curled like snail shells. Jon lurched them both away from her-its grip.

Focus. He had to focus. Find the exit in the meadow. He didn’t dare to entertain the idea of finding one that would open into the Institute. If he did, he Knew the Spiral would light up with false options, each leading them further into the raving tangle of itself.

The exit in the meadow. Exit in the meadow. Exit. Ex—

“Oh, Jon, you just got here and you’re already leaving?”

The hand was suddenly snapped around them like a birdcage. Jon yanked Martin close, away from the cutting edges. 

“Is that any way to treat a friend? Especially one in debt?”

Jon and Martin shouted as the hand bounced them up on its palm. The hand split into hands, their atom-wide points catching at their packs and pulling. Jon clung to Martin’s wrists and Martin returned the grip, his eyes now open to panicked slits. Still looking at Jon. 

“Don’t let go,” Jon huffed through locked teeth. His hands shook where they held, greased by sweat and trembling. “Don’t let go, don’t let go, don’t let go—,”

“Jon—,”

“You’ve more than paid me back with interest for my help around the workplace. It’s only fair I play host awhile, give you the grand tour. You can have this back—,”

“ _Don’t!_ ”

“ _Jon—!_ ”

The hands gave two idle tugs. Martin’s wrists and hands and everything else of him slipped out of Jon’s hold. 

“Martin!”

Martin was palmed with a magician’s flourish. When the fingers opened again, he was gone. 

“—once we finish.”

“ _Martin!_ ”

“If we finish. We’ll see how it plays out.”

“Give him _back!_ ” Jon tried to wrench out of the pack’s straps, only to have his boot caught in yet another hand. It hoisted him up like a caught trout. He was lifted until his upturned face was level with the giddy static of the Distortion’s gaze. “Give him back, you fucking traitor!”

“Such language, Jonathan. I’m stung. I only wanted a little incentive to keep you interested. Seeing as I am, apparently, still not worth your time when I’m not doing something _you_ want me to do. Another might call you a terrible friend. But I am me, and no Other, and I know it was because of you,” the very tip of a molecule-sharp finger tapped his nose and a droplet of blood twinkled, “that I am here in my glorious, Twisting entirety. Along with the rest of the Fearful rabble, of course.”

The Distortion’s giggle broke over Jon’s brain like a sea of migraines. 

“But you have done a grand thing, Jon. A wondrous, stupendous, hideous thing, and it is a gift that will unfold forever, as surely as I will. As to my supposed betrayal—what was it, exactly? The following of my nature? The denial of one single shortcut to the Institute’s hidden surprise after a litany of other little rescues and assistances? 

“Or do you refer to this, my tiny, timeless detour? It is as much a second lost to you as a millennium in here, you know. A break from trudging through Scottish mud and stuff pretending to be the same. I’ll not even scold you for failing to wipe your feet before entering.”

Jon made a noise as he was tossed up again, flying and falling until he collided with another hand. This one broke apart as well, dissolving into dozens of smaller grips, clutching and cutting where they caught him. 

“Put me dow— _ouhh_.” 

Knife-edged digits hooked into the corners of his mouth. If he moved his jaw they would slice up and through his cheeks like paper. 

“What I will scold you for, however, is simply taking a joke too far, Jon. That joke being this grim-glum masquerade you’re still fumbling with. Oh, woe is you, the Archive, the Bringer of the Change, the Key in the Door, it’s all my fault, I’m a dreadful, shameful monster, wail, wail, moan, moan, gripe, gripe. Even after all this, you cling to your misery more tightly than any other’s in this thrilling new world you’ve brought us. As if the penance of your unhappiness will somehow keep you from being what you are. 

“And you know what the worst part is? The worst part is that it isn’t even an act. You genuinely are just this much of a mope. The game is lost, yes, but only for humanity. Jonathan Sims and all his kind are doomed and over. But not you. You, Jon, if you still want to hold onto the name like the baby blanket it is, _you won_. _We_ won. And you are still too ashamed to revel in it. Given eons enough, perhaps you’d get around to it. But, being a friend, I want better for you. And I want it now. However or whenever ‘now’ happens to happen.

“That said.”

The digits in Jon’s mouth pulled up. Jon reared his head back with them, forcing his face to relax. The effect pinned his lips up in a taut, teeth-baring grin. Blood trickled from both corners. Jon felt the trails of them twist on his skin, twirling into curlicues on either cheek.

“Consider this an intervention. I am not a thing wholly of screaming, as you’ll recall. In fact, I quite prefer my occupants to laugh. Granted, not over the most humorous subjects—drinking their own vitreous humor notwithstanding—but laughing just the same. I want that for you, Jon. I want you to leave here happier than you came in, assuming you manage to leave at all.”

Helen’s face crumpled and dented into a pondering shape. The effect hurt Jon’s eyes.

“I have wondered more than once would happen if you ever cracked a genuine smile; if the sheer paradox of it would evaporate you in a puff of positive emotion. I suppose we’ll find out. Oh, and before you ask, yes, Martin’s fine. More or less. Bodily speaking. But there really is only so much a mind can avoid, even with eyes closed and ears covered and your loved one’s name the only thing one dares to speak or think, lest something else crawl in to take its place. Not that I’m telling you anything you don’t already Know. So.”

The hands moved and melded around him until they were no longer dully sawing at him, but pliant as rubber. Specifically, the rubber of a slingshot.

“Good luck.”

“ _Helen_ —,”

“And goodbye.”

The slingshot snapped him out and away. 

He couldn’t tell how far he went, or if the Spiral simply lunged backward around him to make it seem like he’d moved. Whatever the case, Jon braced to crash into one of the shifting, dancing, cackling doors. A moment before his head would’ve broken against the wood, it opened on a new, cascading corridor. Literally cascading—the floor and its carpet runner were a river teeming with nuclear colors of impossible hue, their rapids dragging him away. 

All the way to the waterfall that was the next hall.

Which splashed him into the speeding conveyor belt of the next hall. 

Which led to a throat, which led to a shrieking funhouse tunnel, which led to a hollow full of grasping, tearing things pretending to be hands, which led to—

“ _Stop_.”

A hall. Just a hall. Once Jon Saw it, Jon was in it, and nowhere that the hall Wasn’t. 

He was at an intersection from which hundreds of other halls grew. Not all of them laterally. The impossibility of the architecture was already Archived in him, Known to the point of boredom. It would not impede him. Still, the wallpaper leered out at him, the carpet runner snickered, and his reflections in a thousand tasteful mirrors glared with happy malice from the glass.

“Show him to me.”

The wallpaper, the runner, and the mirrored Jons laughed. 

“Right. Poor choice of words. You don’t show anyone anything that’s real. Let me try again.” 

He was with the Stranger. He was with the Buried. He was with the Dark. He was with the Lonely.

He was here, in the coils of the Spiral. Full, growing fuller, always fuller with the trillion terrors of the howling new world. There was no meal a Fear made that he did not take his share from. 

And Martin? Martin was not beside him to see.

So.

“ **Tell me where he is, or I will tear him through you like a bullet.** ”

Jon was not sure about the _how_ of this statement. He had no clue of the eldritch logistics such a feat would require. He only Knew that he could do exactly as he promised. And that he would. He absolutely would.

_Prentiss’ worms screamed, despite being incapable. Awful sound. What would a world of walls and doors scream like? Would it drown out the laughter of your screeching meals, Helen? Would you like to find out? I would. Terminally curious, you know._

Jon wasn’t sure if he spoke this aloud or not. But the halls stopped laughing. His reflections ran away. Suddenly, the selection of corridors narrowed down to one. Jon started walking.

Knowing it would not lead to Martin. Knowing that the route was necessary anyway. Why?

And why wasn’t he doing as he promised if so?

The easy answer was: he didn’t want to risk Martin. True, nothing died anymore, but Jon would not dare damage him if he could help it. He couldn’t begin to guess what might happen if something went wrong—or too right—as he divulged and dissolved the man’s location in the maze. Something permanent. Something deeper than a break or a bruise. 

The odder answer was: he Knew something important was waiting to be found in here. Not Martin yet, though Martin would come. _Had_ to come. Otherwise—

Well. Jon would not think on that. Ever. For any reason.

Instead, his mind circled, paced, Sought and Saw the turns to take, the doors to open. There were no flashing arrows or signs or dotted line to follow, but there was a route his feet meant to take him. It made no sense, obviously. He doubled back, he turned in place, he took the same doors twice and thrice, he marched along walls and ceilings that were neither, slid on stairs, climbed slides. Outside the Spiral, it would have been a path of utter nonsense, leading nowhere.

Inside the Spiral, it was leading him Nowhere. No Place. A corner of a crevice of an oubliette that Did Not Exist. The terminating point where all spirals ended, at the very center of itself. 

And in that center was a door. _The_ door.

It pulsed. Feverish with un-blood and un-thought. Not locked, because it was never locked.

What was kept on the other side of the door would never know to try the knob once they were in.

Not unless someone—

Jon rapped his knuckles against the wood. _Knock-knock._

A pause. Somewhere, someone moved. Limped. Crawled. Fingernails scraped around the wood their side of the doorknob was set in, a half-remembered appendage trying to recall the action of grasping and turning. Finally, the bolt clicked. The door creaked open a crack.

An eye that oozed its own chromatic jelly down a round jaw peeked out. Overgrown curls that may once have been blond, but now were a noxious lemon brightness, slithered around stooped shoulders. The structure of the face was dented in such a way as to balance between reflexive welcome and a deeper, truer, corkscrewing despair. 

“Yes?” Michael Shelley asked. 

“Michael.”

A small voice groused in the back of his head for a moment—he had only said ‘Tell me where _he_ is,’ not specifying which ‘he’—before shock crowded it out. That, and the billion ringing bells in his mind telling him that something Important was in progress here. He didn’t have to hear the telltale click of the recorder to Know it was listening in, rapt as ever.

“Michael..?” Michael Shelley asked. His head tilted. The image of him slumped along with the motion, making him slosh and fizzle in his lineless silhouette. 

“You. You’re Michael. Michael Shelley.”

Michael Shelley nodded blandly at this, making his hair move in Medusa swirls. His index finger—only a finger, Jon saw, not a blade—tapped his chin. The chin broke like mist.

“Michael Shelley? Yes. He sounds familiar. I think. If I think. Do I think?”

“You do. Or at least, you can. I can help you. Just—you have to come out of there.”

“Where?”

Jon stepped forward.

“Michael—,”

Michael Shelley flinched back, pulling the door with him. The gap was now a mere sliver.

“Who?”

Jon stood wavering at the threshold. Wondering what to do. Wondering if he should do anything. The man had tried to murder him. At least, a pastiche of the man. A poor mimic made with fused chunks of the original. 

_Melanie and the Slaughter. Daisy and the Hunt. How far apart is he from them?_

“You, Michael Shelley. This place, it swallowed you.” Jon gnawed his tongue. Knowing the idea he had was a bad one. Knowing it was the only idea that would come to him. He said, “Gertrude Robinson tricked you into feeding yourself to it. Do you remember Gertrude Robinson? The Archivist?”

“Archivist…” The running pools of Michael Shelley’s eyes turned tackier, then stopped running altogether. The coils of hair stilled. “The Archivist. Gertrude Robinson.” The polite and terrified expression hardened at the edges. The grin was a grimace was a rictus. “I trusted her.”

“Yes. A lot of people did. A lot of people were thrown away for what she thought was the right thing to do. Ruining rituals. And do you know what, Michael Shelley?” Jon leaned forward. The door did not close. “It was all for nothing. The ritual that you were sacrificed to end would never have succeeded in the first place. All anyone had to do was wait, and it would have collapsed on its own. Every ritual would have done the same.” Jon inched closer. The door still did not close. “You and the Distortion wailed about being made pointless, once. You two had the ruined Twisting to blame for that. I can’t say which of you hated your reality more. 

“But I can say this: your sacrifice was pointless, Michael Shelley. All the sacrifices of every assistant and hero and martyr who came before or after you, they were made _pointlessly._ ”

The door opened wider. Michael Shelley’s lines were crisper on the other side of the gap. His smile, which seemed to have been sutured in place, began to fight against its shape. The eyes were wide and running again, though not with liquefaction. 

“And do you know what else? What the cherry on top really is? The Spiral is on Earth now. All the Fears are, because a ritual finally went right—it opened the Door and let every one of them through. They own the world and all the people in it. I bet you can’t guess how.”

The gap grew until the door stood wide open. Michael Shelley stood at the very edge of its threshold, wobbling there as the rest of him congealed into a thing of actual flesh and bone. His eyes, once two chaotic spots of infinite color, were now a clear, wild blue. They blazed in his sunken sockets like hot glass. The corners of his mouth were only turned up out of twitching, failing habit.

“Me. I opened the Door. Easy as turning a Key. Oh, you seem upset.”

Jon made a prayer to a power he knew would not hear him, and thought of every recording he’d ever heard of the old woman, the inflection and turn of voice. And when he opened his mouth, it was her pitch steering his tongue to say:

“Is there something the matter, Michael?”

The last of the smile died and Michael Shelley was vaulting over the threshold. He landed on Jon like a weeping, cursing anvil. His hands came down even harder, all bony knuckles and clawing nails. Then they were locked tight around Jon’s throat. In a version of reality where death was a concern, Jon might have worried. 

_Or cheered. But that kind of exit isn’t an option. Focus, Jon. Make him See._

Jon didn’t have to speak to do it. His hands lifted up to Michael Shelley’s raving face. The last clinging motes of the Spiral were still in those burning blue eyes, turning his pupils into swirling vortexes. Jon cradled his head.

“ _You!_ You traitor, you backstabbing, heartless, hateful crone, kill you, will kill you, I will, I will, better than you deserve, it stitched me inside, you withered bitch, it stitched me inside and stitched itself _through me_ and I was Wasn’t, was Not, was _Michael_ , and you didn’t care, not about any of us, and it didn’t even matter, none of it mattered, you evil hag, kill you, _kill you—!_ ”

_Look, Michael Shelley. Look at me and See._

Michael Shelley did not want to, but he Looked. He Saw. And again, as always, Gertrude Robinson was not there. Not even the Archivist was in his hands.

His face went slack with Knowing this, with Knowing the man who was already healing from the fresh bruises to face and windpipe. Waiting. 

Michael Shelley fell back from him with a dull, carpet-muffled sound. Jon got up slowly, bracing himself for whatever may follow. Michael Shelley just sat there and stared. 

“Michael? Can you hear me?”

“Yes. Yes, I…” The glassy eyes were still dribbling. Tear tracks came in layers. One hand reached up to touch them, suddenly fascinated by the position of his own mouth. “I hear you. I see you, Jonathan Sims.”

“You remember me?”

“The way you remember a dream. Yes. Jonathan Sims. The new Archivist. Only you aren’t the Archivist now. You’re something else.” Michael Shelley looked away from Jon to observe his hands. Now that he’d confirmed he was no longer smiling, he was newly entranced by the reality of his fingers. Skin and bones, the _right_ number of bones, all in the right position. “Is what you said true? About the rituals?”

“Yes.”

“You did it?”

“…Yes.”

Michael Shelley shook his head, still not looking from the marvel of his human hands.

“No.”

“I was there, Michael. I-I did it.” Jon pushed crystallized bile down his throat. “I did it.”

Michael Shelley shook his head again.

“There is a difference between the Key-in-the-Lock and the Hand-that-Turns, Jonathan Sims. Both are necessary. Only one makes a choice.” Michael Shelley looked up from his palms to Jon. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot. “You barely knew what you were when I was Distorted. A newborn, left squalling and uninformed in the wilderness Gertrude Robinson left behind. I remember myself knowing so. It does know a great deal, even through the veil of madness. It knew what you were. It knew I did not know, or did not care, while mashed together with it. Two balls of clay, flattened into each other, all stirred and blended, both and one. 

“I was not enough of me to separate you from her. Archivist is Archivist. Revenge is revenge. Action is action. I could hear so much of it from in there. The door to its Self. Heard it speaking through Helen Richardson's throat, talking at you, planting its rotten seeds in your brain. It and the Mother of Puppets and the old Watchful Eye that would become the Hand-That-Turns. Planting. Plotting. Letting you think even half of what you did was entirely of your will. Fodder for guilt. For hope.

“You believed in that free will even as the Hand nailed your tongue to the ritual, didn’t you, Jonathan Sims? Even as you screamed, imprisoned in your head, pleading with yourself to stop. When you couldn’t. All along, you couldn’t. Not ever. The last choice you made was at the threshold, I think. The tipping place between Terminus and the Ceaseless Watcher. No contract to read. No fine print. Only a choice. Exist in _some_ way, or cease to exist at all. When you chose the former, you signed away all your choices after. 

“My last choice, if it was mine, was to kill the Archivist. But it allowed me that illusion only long enough to toy with me. To convince me it was permittable, before it ripped me out of myself and donned the facsimile of Helen Richardson. A friendly face to become a friend with. To prove the Distortion was an ally, as best it could be. Yes. Yes…”

Michael Shelley frowned at him, seeming to relish the expression.

“You did not want to do what was done. How could you be Key and Hand at once? How could you be the will that damned the world and the Jonathan Sims that stopped to pull me free of myself? You—,” Michael Shelley blinked, his eyes so polished they might have only been ice on the verge of sweating down to nothing, “—you did. You pulled me back. Made me—m-made me _me_ again. Michael Shelley. I’m—I’m—,” A laugh like a sob tore loose and Michael Shelley clamped a hand over the sound. “Hate it, hate that noise, this feeling on my cheeks, I don’t know how long I will before I remember enjoying it again, but, God. _God._ I’m me. I’m sane. I’m real.” 

Michael Shelley began to shake, then to laugh, then to bawl.

“I’m Michael!”

Jon had gotten closer at some point, inching over on his knees. He may have intended to help the man up so they could start moving. Martin was still waiting somewhere and there was no telling if or when the Spiral would decide to pull a new trick. But now that he was in range, Jon found himself caged in the man’s grip again. This time he was being embraced in half. Jon felt bones grind and lungs deflate.

Between the lack of air and the damp, hyperventilating mess crushing itself into his shoulder, he couldn’t bring himself to ask for release. He settled for wrapping his arms around Michael Shelley as best he could—which wasn’t by much, as only his forearms made it out of the crunching hug—and waited.

And thought about Keys. 

“Michael?” he got out after the height of it seemed to pass. “Michael, can you stand?”

“Y-Yes,” a long, wet inhale. A sigh. A nod. “Yes, I can. We need to find the other one, don't we? One of the assistants.”

“Martin.”

“Martin,” Michael said, still breathing in Jon’s shoulder. “We won’t find him in the halls.”

Jon Knew he was right. 

“Where, then?”

“The Spiral loves nothing more than to ruin perception and expectation. Where would you last think to look for him?”

The simple answer would have been, ‘where I last saw him.’ As if Martin really had been palmed like a card, tucked up an impossible sleeve, then shaken out once Jon was out of eyeshot. But that wasn’t the last place Jon would expect to find him. 

_The last place he’d be is somewhere safe and sane and out of the Spiral’s grasp._

And suddenly, he Knew. He felt a powerful urge to put his head through a concrete wall as he did. What was it she-it had said?

_I want you to leave here happier than you came in, assuming you manage to leave at all._

“Michael.”

“Yes?”

“Stand up and do not let go of me.”

Michael Shelley pulled back enough to look at him. The watery eyes searched his face. A decision clicked into place somewhere in the man’s mind, so solid that Jon swore he heard it. A small, cramped, dusty little door unlocking. Something suitably tiny shuffled out to skim over Michael Shelley’s face. 

Trust.

“Okay.”

“Okay.”

They stood. They held to each other. 

_The Stranger._ Jon thought. _The Buried. The Dark. The Lonely. All Archived by experience and exposure. Their endings and exits laid bare after enough Scrutiny. So Look now, Jon. Look and See and Know and turn the Key back—,_

The thought made no sense. But an action was an action and Jon was—

“What is it doing? The Spiral, why’s it—?”

“It’s still Twisting, Michael. But the other way around. Counterclockwise. Just walk. Don’t let go.” 

In point of fact, Michael Shelley seemed to be welded to him. Jon held tight anyway. Their walk became brisker, a rushing pace. Around them, the Spiral still laughed and screamed, but now there was something strangely, bitterly human in it. The lilt of a child which knows it is being cheated out a fun diversion. 

It was supposed to take longer than this, Jon supposed. There was more playtime planned, more pranks, more haunted house horrors carved out of real victims. But now it was too soon and too late at once, because he Saw it, he Knew it, and he was turning, turning, turning it all back on itself—

“Jonathan?”

“Keep moving.”

“Jonathan, it’s coming for us,” Michael panted. And he was right. The Spiral was fighting this new Twist, trying to wrench itself down and around them, to unmake the hall it had retched up against its implacable, fluid will. “It isn’t done, it doesn’t want us out, it won’t let us out—,”

“Yes, it will.”

“I have been it and been in it for years, Jonathan. I know it won’t.” Michael Shelley made a small sound. A noise like cracking glass. “You shouldn’t have stopped for me.”

“We’re getting out, Michael.”

“We won’t! The Spiral lets nothing go, don’t you see? It’s like the vortex of a tornado, a whirlpool, it just pulls and Twists and never releases. Even the ones who break the surface are always dragged back. It won’t let us go…”

“It will.”

“How do you know? Is that what the Ceaseless Watcher is telling you?”

“I know, because a Door doesn’t have any more say than a Key does.”

“But—,”

“Michael, look where I’m Looking. What do you see?” 

Michael Shelley looked. The Spiral growled.

“Oh.”

Michael Shelley Saw. The Spiral roared.

“Run,” Jon said, an octave short of Compelling. “ _Run!_ ”

They ran. The Spiral snarled on all sides of them, thrashing in its own unwanted shape, making the hall’s lines undulate and shudder. It did not want to be a straight line, did not want to show them what the Archive was not meant to see so early, did not want to Twist this way instead of that, _did not could not would not let them go—_

On the other side of the second door in the meadow, Martin Blackwood was shouting abuse at the yellowed old wood. Had been for either minutes or hours. The knob refused to turn no matter how he yanked at it, Helen did not answer no matter how he hammered at it with hands and boots and every spare tool in his pack. Both shoulders ached from trying to force the thing in. He had wedged the tip of a crowbar into the place where the door met its frame and was emptily stunned at how the metal was suffering more damage than the timber, when the doorknob turned.

All he had for a warning was a tiny _click_ of the bolt before the door swung open and two gangly bodies stampeded out. They bowled Martin over in a tangle of limbs and fresh bruises. Behind them, the door slammed shut with a sullen, sour crash of wood against wood.

Martin had just got through half a sore groan before there were familiar, skinny arms latched around him and likewise familiar stubble grinding against his cheek, masking the grinning lips underneath.

“Jon!” Martin was up off his back and clamped around the thinner man in the space of a blink. “Jesus, Jon, I thought—I thought you’d been—,”

“I know. I know, I know, me too, I know.” Every ‘know’ was punctuated by another peck. Martin squeezed him tighter. Then stopped short when Jon winced. 

“Oh shit, shit, sorry, are you hurt? Did it do something to you?”

“Yes and no. I’m fine. Just healing up from the last hug.”

“What?”

“Um.” Martin looked up at the voice. It was likewise familiar, but sans the migraine-sharpened edge. Even without being a taffy-pulled, knife-handed, grinning terror in the Institute’s tunnels, Martin recognized him. Michael Shelley gave a little wave. “Hello. Again. Sort of.”

“...Hi. Jon?”

“Yes, Martin?”

“Is that Michael?”

“Yes, Martin.”

“The same Michael that dumped Tim and I in a nightmare hell-maze and tried to murder you?”

“In his defense, I gave him permission for the last bit. And it’s not like murder attempts on me were a special status thing back in the day. But, ah, yeah. This is Michael—the _real_ one. No Distortion filler.” Jon sat up on his own and looked to the disheveled man who was busily fumbling with his hands. “Michael Shelley. Right?”

“Right,” said Michael Shelley. His eyes watered as he said it. “Michael Shelley.” Said watery eyes glanced grimly to the door they’d left. “It’s watching us.”

“Yeah. I’m Watching it back.”

“It won’t let us go, Jonathan. Not really. It’ll wait. It’ll catch us when we aren’t paying attention.”

“I imagine it would.” Jon stopped Watching and started Glaring. Martin had been learning to spot the difference over the past few un-days. It usually portended a slip into one of his ominous spells. Before Martin could say anything on the matter, Jon grated out, “Wouldn’t you, Helen?”

The door opened. Helen stood there, all innocuous curls, the friend living under the Institute, smiling past the space of her-its face.

“Why, what makes you say that, Jon? You escaped me fair and square, didn’t you? You and that living mistake of a participation trophy. You’ve made it out.”

“Same as Helen Richardson did. Same as any of the ‘escapees’ do.”

“Oh, but that was so long ago, wasn’t it? Back when I was that,” Helen gestured at Michael Shelley with a cutting hand, “back when I was not already glutted on the hefty piece of the pie you so graciously offered up to me. What reason would I have to snap you paltry few morsels back up? My runaway regurgitations? You have your little trek to be getting on with and I’d hate to deny the Ceaseless Watcher its show…”

“Unless you think it would be funny. The same way you thought it would be funny to keep the Panopticon a secret. The same way you thought it would be funny to let Martin be swept into the Lonely instead of helping him get away from Lukas. The same way you think it would be funny to let Michael get the same runaround Helen Richardson did, that brief gasp of being outside of you, only to trick him back in. Even if you hate him— _especially_ because you hate him—you would take him back in. Wouldn’t you?”

“Oh, Jon, do you really think so little of me—,”

“ _Wouldn’t you?_ ” The question crackled and the air curdled.

Helen’s smile crimped, but did not drop.

“Fine. Yes, I would. And I will. Not right now, obviously. Too soon for that. Our poor, pointless Michael hasn’t had more than a minute to enjoy the lovely new vista of the Changed world. For all I know, there may be some other, even more welcoming Fear waiting for him out there. I’m sure the Stranger would love to get its hands on him. Whoever or whatever he might experiment with, or might experiment on him, I will be ready and waiting to accept him again. Just as surely as he was ready to accept you, Jon. Or do you not recall which version of us it was that wanted you dead at our doorstep?”

“I recall,” Jon said. He was standing now. Walking. 

“Jon—,” from Martin.

“Jonathan, don’t—,” from Michael Shelley.

“Yes, Jonathan, don’t. Whatever it is you think you can do; I don’t recommend trying it on me twice in one sitting. You are stronger now, I’ll grant. Even managed to cut our playdate short. But whatever eerie, awful Eyeful of a threat you think you pose to me, it is not enough to deter me from my purpose. From, well, anything I feel like doing.”

“Like leading me to Michael?”

Helen paused. Just for an instant. 

The smile flickered.

“Of course,” she-it hummed. “Wasn’t doing much with him anyway, moldering, moping thing that he was. And I was curious to see what would happen.” Her shrug curled at the shoulders. “Call it whimsy.”

“Whim. Whose whim, Helen?”

“Mine.”

“Yes. But which you?”

“Oh, we’re doing another round of identity crises, are we? Am I wearing her or is she wearing me? Are we singular or merely conjoined? Chicken or egg? It makes no difference, Jon, it never has—,”

“It does. Because not all of your whims are of the Distortion. Most, yes. But not all. Preferences. Habits. Moods. Choices. Small things, almost infinitesimal in that bag of shrapnel you call a mind, but they’re there. Not just molded and melted together, homogenous. Like the choice to pluck that worm from Sasha’s shoulder the day you—he—showed her how they could be killed. If he’d left it to burrow, there would have been time enough for her to pass her statement on to me and die in a burst of pestilence later. But he stopped it anyway. Why? I think it was the same reason you didn’t close around us the moment you saw I Knew the way out and started turning you to fit around me.

“Two clays mashed together can always come close to perfect blending. Absorbing each other. Especially when one mound is a mountain compared to the other’s mere muddy crumb. But the essence of that crumb—that mind—still exists. Never obliterated or erased, no matter how stretched thin it is.

“Isn’t that right, Ms. Richardson?”

The Distortion went very still. Her-its grin crumpled and strained on the misshapen jaw. Then it was laughing. As loud and as shrill as it could, so hard that it ruptured and re-ruptured the illusory throat.

“Ah, my mistake! This is a new game after all! The Jekyll versus Hyde debate, I-Know-You’re-In-There-Somewhere, that whole schmaltzy ride. I do hate to disappoint, but even if Helen were available for such a speech, and she isn’t, she would need to be within your actual reach. The door you spurred Michael from was the only way into me, and you only goaded him loose because I allowed it. This skin,” Helen purred, rumbled, rippled, “is the perfect opposite to that farce. The face of my triumph. My everlasting victory. I’m quite attached.” Helen’s lines disintegrated. “ _And I’m staying that way._ ” 

“Tell me so from the other side of the threshold.”

It was then that Martin saw what Jon had. Helen had retreated for every step Jon took forward. Not a great deal, just enough to keep from touching her-it. Only now the bladed hand had floated out to rest on the door’s interior knob. The sharp fingers quivered. 

“Another time, Jon,” the Distortion hissed. The door swung shut.

Almost. 

Jon’s hand caught around the knob a centimeter short of the door hitting the frame.

“Let go, Jon.”

“You weren’t too busy for me before. Open up.”

“I was making time for you. But some of us have work to do, Archive. Let go.”

“No.”

The door and its Spiraling contents boiled with horrible color. Twisted promises leaked from the opening to stain the air around its frame.

“ _Let. Go._ ”

Above them, the Eye and all its fellows were wide. Their pupils were deeper than the Vast, blacker than the Dark. Thunder that wasn’t thunder roared, breaking up into an ear-piercing static.

“ _ **No.**_ ” 

The Distortion pushed. 

The Archive turned. And turned, and turned, and turned, forcing the Twist back the wrong way, the knob straining in both his hands, counterclockwise, turning, turning, turning Back—

Martin was on his feet by then. Michael Shelley a moment after. Before either of them could reach Jon, there was a flash. 

A bright, searing, brain-burning eruption of tortured colors and pained coils that had been warped out of their proper, impossible states. The sound that came with the sight was worse. 

For that one millisecond of an instant, Martin saw three figures outlined in the burst.

A man, a woman, and a thing with no shape at all. The latter was left to Twist in on itself and the new, agonizing hole that had been ripped through it. 

This non-shape keened once more before flailing backward and slamming the door. Martin saw that the knob on it was dented in the form of a gripping fist. A brand like an eye sizzled on the metal. 

Then the door was gone. As was the twin he and Jon had first entered by. 

Jon lay sprawled on the ground again. Helen Richardson was wheezing on top of him, one of her hands clamped tight between both of his. And it was only a hand. 

“Helen,” Jon rasped. “Tell me what you See.”

“You,” Helen Richardson croaked back. “I-I see you, Jon. Jon?” she shuddered. Her eyes were dripping. “Jon..?”

Jon risked a smile.

“Hello again.”

The following stretch of time was a confusing one for Martin. Which was a surprise in and of itself, considering how inoculated he’d become to shock since the Change took over. Not a bad sort of confusion, he supposed, but certainly a weird one. If only because they had to remain rooted in one spot while Michael Shelley and Helen Richardson not only became reacquainted with sanity and solidity, but clung to Jon as if he were radiating capital C Clarity for them to soak up like an eldritch version of vitamin D.

Which he sort of was, in a way. Wretched as the Eye’s Knowledge was, it never lied. The utter opposite of the Twisting Deceit. So Jon would hypothesize later. Along with another theory.

“You’re sure that’s what made it work? The whole Key-to-the-Door analogy?”

“Not just analogy anymore, if it ever was,” Jon said, still digging in his pack. “I was literally made into the thing that Jonah needed to perform the successful ritual. Like cutting a Key to fit and turn in a specific lock. To do that cutting, he had to mark me with every one of the Fears. Encounter them, experience them, whatever. But in some cases—when I was actually set inside the dominion of the Fears—I was forced into a position where experience wasn’t enough. I had to undo them. Escape.”

“The thing with the Unknowing, the coffin, that runaround with the Dark Sun, and Peter?”

“Right. And there was that fun bit with Melanie when I had to take the bullet out.” Jon smiled as he finally unearthed what he was looking for. Spare boots. “Undoing a conversion. Turning things back, unmaking what they became.”

“Because a Key turns both ways.”

“Exactly. I’m still not sure about the hows of a, you know, worldwide version of it. But I think it must be part of fixing things.”

“Turning the world back,” Martin sighed. It was nearly a laugh. “Certainly a place to start. Though I am still absolutely adamant that I get to bash Jonah’s head through a table. I’m owed that.”

“Martin, please. Everyone’s owed that. I call breaking his shins, by the way.” He began digging in his pack again. Came up with one sock. Dug for another. “So, are you alright with this?”

“With what?”

“Them.”

“Do you actually have to ask?”

Jon glanced at him.

“Yes.”

Martin almost spoke, then didn’t. He looked past Jon to where Michael Shelley and Helen Richardson sat. They were both huddled at the crest of the hill, observing the Changed world in all its grotesquerie. No screams, no lamentations, just looking. Between them, two hands locked so tight their knuckles strained. Martin withheld a sigh.

“Do you trust them, Jon?”

“We can’t just leave them.”

“You said yourself the Distortion isn’t about to pull anything again. It’s got something to risk now, if you can turn it inside out and make it hurt. And it knows your MO with stuff like this too. Once you Archive a thing, it can’t dupe you twice and it can’t hide.”

“We can’t leave them, Martin.”

“And you can’t seem to answer my question. Do you trust them?”

Jon took a turn to look at them. Not a Look, but a look.

“As much as I did Melanie. And Daisy.”

“Yeah, and you trusted Jared Hopworth with your skeleton. You’ve got a bit of a patchy record when it comes to trust, Jon. Sorry.”

“Well, perhaps, but—,”

“Melanie and Daisy included. You know, the charming ladies on Team Archive who also actively tried to murder you.”

“Wasn’t their fault.” Jon continued to look at the pair on the hilltop. “Not theirs either.”

“You think, or you Know?”

“Martin.”

“Jon.”

“I believe they aren’t what they were as the Distortion. Or even as—as people. They couldn’t be, not after everything. But that’s just, you know, change. I’d be more worried if they seemed entirely alright. Wouldn’t you?”

“Well…”

“You would. And to answer you, yes. Yes, I think I do trust them. I have to trust that they are human. That they are capable of getting better, even after all of this. But more than that?” Jon finally dug up another sock. He began stuffing the cotton of them down into the toes of the boots. “I’d have appreciated someone watching out for me in their position.” Jon brandished a guileless smile. To Martin it was more menacing than a sickle. “Not everyone gets a Martin.”

There it was. Martin groaned.

“Oh, you bastard. You rehearsed that didn’t you? Didn’t you?” He flattened a hand over Jon’s horrible, proud grin and shoved him back. “Put that away, I can’t look at you. Go on.”

Jon went. Martin got up and shuffled after him. It paid not to take one’s eyes off each other out here. So he watched as Jon approached Mr. Shelley and Ms. Richardson. He saw him trade the boots for Ms. Richardson’s sensible heels, sorry about the fit. Saw him offer Michael a hair tie and clip for his overgrown locks, did he maybe want a cap? Listened to them talk and whisper and talk some more. 

Then they were all on their feet. Onward to the Eye. 

Below and above and all around them, the world began to Turn.


End file.
